Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz

Zork Zero, i hate you.

i hate your massively overblown size, mostly full of empty rooms with no purpose. i hate the excessive copy protection, with many promising puzzles (including the game's central puzzle) turning out to be "do you have the documentation" checks.

but the reason why Zork Zero feels like such a cop-out, such a zero-effort mess?

Towers of Hanoi!
fox, chicken, and grain!
Hi-Q!
Nim!
measuring liquid using two vessels!
true and false statements written on doors!
the executioner's paradox!
a freaking rebus!

what in the heck are all of these ancient bewhiskered cliches -- many of them extremely belabored and move-intensive -- doing in a game produced in the twentieth century? let alone in a Zork game, a series known for the cleverness and wry sense of humor in its puzzles?

the worst part is that these old chestnuts make up the game's better puzzles. the original ones, like catching the flies, breaking the couple's curse, and the fungus puzzle, are utterly half-hearted. there's no depth to them; frequently they're mostly just hauling the right objects across the bloated map.

about the only puzzle in this game that felt truly satisfying and Zorkian was breaking the hunger curse. i had to use a variety of objects in weird ways to achieve a completely loopy goal.

but everything else ... this is just a miserable slog of busywork and cliche. i understand making a game this huge is difficult, so there's a temptation to just fill it up with junk so you can boast about the number of puzzles ... but you know, you could just have made the game smaller and actually good.

I love the Zork games. I really do. And this game had some delightful parts, but enough is enough.

For one, the world is HUGE! Epically huge. There are hundreds of useless items, and a tower with 400 floors. Getting to floor 400 berates you for wasting your time (and it is a waste of time considering you might be randomly teleported to the bottom). You need the feelies to even understand what you're supposed to be doing, much less solve the puzzles, as the feelies include maps of areas you can't see in-game (such as a chessboard puzzle where you need to insert passages in the walls- and need a feelie map to see where).

Some of the puzzles are rehashes of old games, like the tower of Hanai, the fox, chicken, grain, tricking someone with a mental paradox, or a card game with no real point except to perform a special series of moves described in (here it comes) the feelies.

The game did have some nice touches. There are plenty of AMUSING things to do, such as manipulating a stone pigeon that teleports you to the location of it's perch, leaving you to throw that perch EVERYWHERE, such as off the bottom of the world, into the sea, etc, so you can teleport to it. (A similar mechanism existed in Spellbreaker, though they didn't implement much experimentation with it.)

The game also explains where Grues come from and the origin of the White House from Zork I, and such, but the ending leaves you wondering "What the Hell?", especially after such a LONG game. That and a random Jester who shows up and messes with you (Much like the annoying wizard from Zork II), it just leaves me saying enough is enough.

If the game were more clever, with better thought out puzzles, it might be different, but after 3 Zork games, we're still left with a varaint of "Go collect all the treasures and put them in the trophy case" that we were using decades ago. For die-hard zorkers (like me), you'll play to the end, but I promise you, you'll use plenty of hints, since many puzzles have nonsensical solutions. If you're into that, have fun, but I found the game fairly aggrivating, and not in that really good way.

I played this as the last story of the Zork Anthology. Computer games were getting more sophsticated, so if another Zork game were to be made, Infocom would want to utilize the latest technology. Beyond Zork was wonderful and would be a tough act to follow, so rather than continue the storyline from there, the idea was to have another Zork game retroactive to the original trilogy.

That was the first mistake, in my opinion. Movies or games that take place prior to the originals usually try too hard to tie loose ends together. We see that not only in the prologue, but in the endgame as well. I also didn't like the character Dimwit, or the various room descriptions that smacked of Dimwit's orders of magnitude.

The game is big in terms of number of rooms, which I normally would enjoy. There are over 200 rooms, not counting all the duplicate rooms that comprise the 400-story tower. But a number of rooms have no significance and seem to only have been added to pad out the game size. I also wish there had been more balance. The castle takes up a large percentage of the world map, and there is precious little time spent in places like Antharia and The Gray Mountains. I do like the little icons with mini graphical representations of each room though.

Given that the story takes place prior to Zork I, it does make sense that the object would be similar to the original - find all the items of interest and bring them to the proper place. Additional reliance on feelies is kind of a nice touch. You'll be reading through the calendar multiple times to learn a few clues vital to completion.

What adds to the challenge is the jester, who appears at random points, and quite a few non-random points as well. You'll depend on him for help and several items, a few of which he gives you randomly. This makes walkthroughs difficult to create as well as follow, because you then have to hold off exploring certain places as long as possible. I do like a couple of his appearances though, like in the Inquisition.

My biggest gripe is the presence of various puzzles which are simply tacked on to the quest. On the one hand, I can appreciate the graphical representations of such things as the Towers Of Hanoi and the "peg-jump" puzzle, but what are they doing in a Zork game? Further, the way some of them are presented is just ridiculous, like the parody of "The fox, the goose, and the grain". Others, like the Room Of Three Doors, I'm guessing people more likely "solved" through save-scumming, rather than figuring them out normally.

Finally, there's the ending. (Spoiler - click to show)All throughout the game, I expected to stop the curse of Megaboz. It took a long time to realize I was meant to fulfill the curse instead. The fact the castle shrinks into the white house from Zork I was just lame, not to mention that the jester turns out to be Megaboz himself, and dubs thee Dungeon Master, who would later torment adventurers in Zork III.

I'm glad I came across the Zork games in the mid-90s, rather than when they were first released. It must have been a disappointment for fans in the last days of Infocom to see the Zork series end the way it did, until Return To Zork came along.